Chapter 6

CHAPTER VI

BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST

Mr. William Sharp, in his _Life_ of Browning, quotes the remarks of
another critic to the following effect: "The poet's processes of
thought are scientific in their precision and analysis; the sudden
conclusion that he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept."

This is a very fair but a very curious example of the way in which
Browning is treated. For what is the state of affairs? A man publishes
a series of poems, vigorous, perplexing, and unique. The critics read
them, and they decide that he has failed as a poet, but that he is a
remarkable philosopher and logician. They then proceed to examine his
philosophy, and show with great triumph that it is unphilosophical,
and to examine his logic and show with great triumph that it is not
logical, but "transcendental and inept." In other words, Browning is
first denounced for being a logician and not a poet, and then
denounced for insisting on being a poet when they have decided that he
is to be a logician. It is just as if a man were to say first that a
garden was so neglected that it was only fit for a boys' playground,
and then complain of the unsuitability in a boys' playground of
rockeries and flower-beds.

As we find, after this manner, that Browning does not act
satisfactorily as that which we have decided that he shall be--a
logician--it might possibly be worth while to make another attempt to
see whether he may not, after all, be more valid than we thought as to
what he himself professed to be--a poet. And if we study this
seriously and sympathetically, we shall soon come to a conclusion. It
is a gross and complete slander upon Browning to say that his
processes of thought are scientific in their precision and analysis.
They are nothing of the sort; if they were, Browning could not be a
good poet. The critic speaks of the conclusions of a poem as
"transcendental and inept"; but the conclusions of a poem, if they are
not transcendental, must be inept. Do the people who call one of
Browning's poems scientific in its analysis realise the meaning of
what they say? One is tempted to think that they know a scientific
analysis when they see it as little as they know a good poem. The one
supreme difference between the scientific method and the artistic
method is, roughly speaking, simply this--that a scientific statement
means the same thing wherever and whenever it is uttered, and that an
artistic statement means something entirely different, according to
the relation in which it stands to its surroundings. The remark, let
us say, that the whale is a mammal, or the remark that sixteen ounces
go to a pound, is equally true, and means exactly the same thing,